August 8, 2013/in Trends/by Elin MattssoncloseAuthor: Elin MattssonName: Elin MattssonEmail: elin.mattsson@basefarm.seSite:About: Head of Communications at Basefarm in Sweden, working with communications and marketing on local and global level. Blogging about our weekday, events and Basefarm in general.See Authors Posts (19)

Earlier this summer our Chief Business Development Officer and VP in Sweden, Stefan Månsby, were representing Basefarm in an expert panel, talking about trends in the technology magazine IDG. We thought that you who like technology trends would be interested in reading about what we think about the trends. Below you can see Stefan Månsby’s answers from the magazine.

Question1:Is it reasonable to invest in creating a hosting solution with configuration tools, monitoring, security and other things that comprises the employees own client devices that they bring to work? How flexible should you be when it comes to choice of client devices? Is it best to create a list over a few approved devices or try to handle all of them?

SM: It’s always more effective to let employees work with the tools that they already use or are familiar with. Treat all clients as they were in an open network with as many foreign computers as familiar computers. Then let the systems they work with, qualify if the client should have access or not.

Question 2:Many vendors, such as HP, is trying to create a toolkit to handle all IT for companies. This solution often means that you are forced to have two solutions because it’s hard to remove older tools. Will it be possible to run entirely with modern solutions in three years, or will we be forced to continue using older tools in parallel?

SM: The important thing is to remember that you first of all create a decommissioning plan for the old tools, and then create a plan for the new tools that are in line with the decommissioning plan. In this way, you avoid to duplicate tools. It’s important that you work with follow-up of the outcome.

Question 3:How far have Swedish companies come in integrate local recourses with cloud resources in their hosting solutions? Is it a realistic goal to try and do it?

SM: The Swedish companies haven’t gone far in this area. The small percentage that using cloud, use it for e-mail or CRM, which usually isn’t integrated with any internal system. Today, there is too little expertise within cloud integration among Swedish consultants and integrators.

Question 4:The SOA (Service-oriented architecture) thinking is not that hot anymore, but many companies have actually implemented this type of strategies. Are there any general hosting solutions to manage the services that are created or are proprietary solutions required?

SM: I can’t agree that SOA isn’t still a hot subject. It’s only smaller projects and companies that have started to realize that it’s not profitable to add extra work for SOA. The hosting solution for a SOA or non-SOA architecture have in principle the same set of requirements and needs.

On Tuesday, computer security firm Rapid 7 released information that they found approximately 23 million products connected to the Internet that are susceptible to being completely taken over by anyone with bad willed intent, and another 40 million can be shut down remotely by someone who wants to. The vulnerability affects 1500 vendors (including vendors such as Linksys, D-Link and Netgear) and almost 7000 products (ranging from routers, TVs, Media Devices etc). So, if you are for example running a Linksys WRT610N router at home that you use when connecting to the VPN at the office, then someone could potentially access this router and set up a man-in-the-middle attack in order to get your credentials or whatever they want to do. Due to the amount of devices affected, it’s suggested by the vendors that you simply disable UPnP in your router or other devices unless you explicitly need it. You can find information on how to do this on the page of your vendor.

A week from today Microsoft releases Windows Server 2012. For ordinary computer users this release may not mean a lot, but for us working with running large server systems it will be a game changer.

Fundamental parts of the Windows Server operating system have been changed. Some changes are visible such as the lack of a graphical user interface on a standard server. Other changes are less visible; new storage options, filesystems etc.

A very big change for operations is that PowerShell really have moved into the core of managing Windows. This will allow us to automate more than before, with ease!

I won’t go into all the details here but if you want to be part of the launch event for Windows Server 2012, setup a reminder here.